Yakkin’ About Kamala Harris

by Jonathan M. Katz and Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos: I thought we might start this week on the plan of expanding our news coverage a bit more, because wow??

Jonathan M. Katz: Just a few hundred things all happening.

I mean, the shape of the presidential race has just completely changed.

MB: Completely. I did not understand how relieved people were going to feel, just from having the thing decided.

JMK: Yeah. Yeah. I think the sense of confidence and certainty that Biden injected into it as he was on his way out the door did a huge service in that regard.

I think…the things that I was worried about didn’t really come to pass. I was worried it was going to be chaos.

MB: Me too. These calls for an open convention, when you have a line of succession? What do you think the freaking vice president is for? That’s what it’s for, is if the guy cannot manage. 

And so there was this terrible fear of, we’re not going to know for a really long time.

JMK: And I was worried—and I mean, this still could happen—that it was just going to open all these fault lines in the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party is a very fractious, tenuous coalition between people who don’t have a whole lot in common, except a vague allegiance to liberal principles and a hatred of Republicans and Trump. Other than that, they can’t really agree on much. I mean, Israel/Palestine is the perfect example. 

You have people who, their main issue is stop the genocide, and you have people who, their main issue or one of their main issues is support for Israel, even if they come to it from a liberal Zionist standpoint. Trying to put the Philadelphia collar counties and Dearborn in the same party, it takes a lot of nose-holding and a lot of strategic deafness.

Part of my concern was that having an open convention or an open primary under an extremely compressed schedule might mean that you were going to have a Medicare for All candidate and an anti Medicare for All candidate, and then a defund the police candidate and a law and order candidate, all these different parts of the party, and they would all just barely hang together. It all might just come apart. Even in the 2020 general election when we had just like, a Bernie Sanders wing versus a Hillary Clinton dead-ender wing, those people—I wouldn’t say they buried the hatchet, but the hatchets weren’t out.